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Career Builders and Now Doting Parents

Sylvia Hom and Kevin Olden, who married in 1981, were in their 50s when they made a "very careful, thoughtful decision" to adopt a baby.

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more. Send us your story and photos through our submission form.

Kevin Olden and Sylvia Hom met in 1976 when she was working at a Los Angeles hospital and he was a medical resident there. The couple married five years later. Kevin, a gastroenterologist, maintained a private practice for 17 years before going into academia. Sylvia worked in finance, eventually leaving to become a stay-at-home mother. The couple has a 13-year-old daughter and live in Scottsdale, Ariz. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

How did you meet?

Sylvia: I was working for a medical oncologist as a secretary after I got my bachelor’s degree and he started at the internal medicine program. He was rotating through the oncology department and caring for one of our very charismatic patients. I would call to ask how the patient was and I think he just started to get to know more about me and asked me out on a date.

Kevin: I’d recently divorced from a med school marriage that didn’t last long. It turned out the wife of one of the other residents was also named Sylvia Hom, but she was a red-haired Caucasian woman. One day Sylvia called to thank me for the care I was giving to this patient. I told her that I enjoyed working with her husband and she said, “But I’m not married,” and told me that she was the Chinese research assistant and that there were two Sylvia Homs. I asked her to dinner and things moved rapidly after that.

Sylvia: When Kevin went to pick me up on our first date, he was driving an old American car, and in L.A. where you are what you drive, this was not a good first impression. We were all driving imports. However, we hit it off because he was more of a good friend at first than a romantic interest. We bonded over our common interests in the patients and the clinic.

Kevin: She moved in with me less than a month after we started dating.

You didn’t marry immediately.

Sylvia: We lived together for five years before we married. He was very busy with residency programs and after two years was accepted to a residency in psychology at Mass General in Boston. I had just finished a master’s in bio statistics and public health and decided to go with him. By five years we felt married and just wanted to make it legal.

Kevin: It wasn’t much of a discussion. “O.K., it’s time.” We started planning in January and married in April.

The wedding?

Sylvia: Lovely: a very tiny ceremony at my parents’ house. It was just 25 people and a judge to perform the vows. My brother is a florist and did all the flowers. All I had to do was buy a wedding dress. We had a traditional Chinese banquet afterward with nearly 500 people. It sounds strange but in the Chinese culture, you are sort of measured by how many tables you have. So basically you just invite everyone in your address book.

Kevin: We were bit players. There were people I’d never met before and never saw again.

Did you feel accepted by Sylvia’s family?

Kevin: I had spent some time in the Philippines and I had some working knowledge of Chinese culture and customs. When I met Sylvia I said some stuff to her in Chinese. It was an unmitigated disaster. She looked at me like, “What?” Sylvia grew up in California and is about as Chinese as a hot dog.

Sylvia: He tried to impress me with his knowledge of Chinese. I had no idea what he was talking about. He thought I was more in tune with my culture than I really was and I was put off a bit.

Kevin: It did, however, have a tremendous effect with her very ethnic mother. When I got to meet them I did the bow and talked in Chinese and I knew how to use the chopsticks and all of these very subtle moves that are polite. She said to Sylvia, “Marry him.”

You were married for 17 years before you had children?

Sylvia: We were building our careers and never really thought about children. Or one of us would be ready and the other was not. We were always open to adoption and when I was 50 and he was 52 we adopted a 7-month-old girl from Vietnam.

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The couple and their daughter. "A lot of the stresses that the 30-something parents were going through, like giving up their unconstrained social lives, didn’t really bother us," he says.

Kevin: To put it harshly, it was middle-class yuppie narcissism. We were having fun traveling and going to every restaurant in San Francisco at the time. When we left San Francisco for me to work at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., it was a much slower, family-oriented environment. We thought, O.K. we really want to do this and it was deliberate and serious.

Did your parenting styles synch?

Kevin: There was friction because I was so obsessive and she was more laidback. My sense of responsibility around my daughter is like nothing else I’ve ever dealt with. When she was a baby, I couldn’t even leave her alone or out of my line of sight for one minute to go to the other room, even if she was totally secured in a high chair. Sylvia was more laidback.

Sylvia: I loved being a parent. With a little person in your house you just can’t be serious all the time.

Were there challenges in being older parents?

Sylvia: We were always taken for the grandparents. All of our daughter’s friends’ parents are in their 20s and 30s, and when I would get together with the other moms they would talk about their sororities and ‘80s and ‘90s music and I just had no clue. I went to college during the height of the Vietnam War and was tear-gassed by the National Guard.

Kevin: Au contraire, I saw that a lot of the stresses that the 30-something parents were going through, like giving up their unconstrained social lives, didn’t really bother us. We had made a very careful, thoughtful decision to have Kim. We had already been to Hong Kong and the places the younger parents wouldn’t go until their kids were out of the house.

Was there ever a time you considered splitting up?

Sylvia: We moved to Arizona in 1998 and bought some land to build a house. Two years after the house was finished he decided to leave for another position in Mobile, Ala. For me this was a big crisis. We went to counseling for about a year before we left. I ultimately decided that the family was more important than geography. We kept the house and rented it for the seven years that we were gone. I really hated Alabama. He wanted me to find things that I liked, but it just wore me down.

Kevin: If you are going to pursue these academic jobs you have to keep going to the next thing. I got an offer to work at the university in Mobile, Ala. We had just finished building this house that gave her a lot of pride of ownership and then, after 18 months, I accepted this job. The mourning process for leaving the house and Scottsdale was extraordinary. It was the biggest crisis in our marriage and every time I tried to give the cloud a silver lining I was met with contempt.

What did you learn from therapy?

Sylvia: Resolve conflicts by understanding better what the other person’s feelings are. When I was having trouble adjusting he would suggest that I go out and do something like join the art museum, but I was looking for his emotional support. I wanted him to say that he knew it was hard but that we would work on it together. And I learned that maybe when he hears my reservations it undermines his confidence in his decisions for our family.

Sylvia, did you find anything you liked in Alabama?

Sylvia: The best thing about our moves has been the fabulous friends that we have made.

Did divorce ever come up?

Sylvia: It didn’t really. I was miserable but it wasn’t worth splitting up the family. I think because we adopted late in life we never really thought about splitting up. I LOVE my family and I realized that I had to prioritize that.

Kevin: There were a couple of nights when Sylvia was impossible and saying things about leaving and I would think I’d have to start planning for this. One night I went to my boss’s house and laid it all out for him; that I might have to leave on short notice, or might have to get divorced. But the basic glue that had held us together was still there. We moved from Mobile to Little Rock and then to Washington, D.C., before returning to Scottsdale. Things are very settled now; it’s all ancient history.

Kevin, she gave up Arizona; what did you give up?

Kevin: I think it’s fair to say that I was not giving up anything except what Sylvia was giving up, but it was much more valuable to her. I was trying to sell Mobile, but there wasn’t much there for her. She was giving up a lot and getting very little in return. As I replay it what we should have done was to hit pause and start looking elsewhere.

What holds you together?

Sylvia: Kevin is really a striver and he always wants to do better and know more. He is very caring and I love those traits about him. He is a great provider and wants us to be the best family we can be.

Kevin: She is incredibly caring but at times, if you let her caring flow unchecked, she will feel exploited, so I’ve learned to monitor that. She is much more pragmatic than I am and reins in my lunatic tendencies. I will say, “Let’s go buy a new Corvette” and she thinks why realistically it won’t work. She’s also smarter than I am; she has an extraordinary mathematical brain.

Why has it lasted?

Sylvia: Giving each other space. I had my work; we had our individual lives. Even when we travel we have a good balance — he loves military history and I love theater. We do things separately and meet for dinner.